A Greek, named Tyrannion, later on obtained permission to make use of and publish the manuscripts of Aristotle, and he prepared an edition of them, which, however, also bears the reproach of being inaccurate, for here they had the fate of being given by the dealers into the hands of ignorant copyists, who introduced a number of additional corruptions.[84] This is the way in which the Aristotelian philosophy has come to us. Aristotle certainly made known much to his contemporaries, that is to say, the writings in the Alexandrian library, but even those works do not seem to have been widely known. In fact, many of them are most corrupt, imperfect, and, as, for example, the Poetics, incomplete. Several of them, such as the Metaphysical treatises, seem to be patched up from different writings, so that the higher criticism can give rein to all its ingenuity, and, according to one clever critic, the matter may with much show of probability be decided in one particular way, while another ingenious person has a different explanation to oppose to this.[85] So much remains certain, that the writings of Aristotle are corrupt, and often both in their details and in the main, not consistent; and we often find whole paragraphs almost verbally repeated. Since the evil is so old, no real cure can certainly be looked for; however, the matter is not so bad as would appear from this description. There are many and important works which may be considered to be entire and uninjured, and though there are others corrupt here and there, or not well arranged, yet, as far as the essentials are concerned, no such great harm has been done as might appear. What we possess therefore places us in a sufficiently good position to form a definite idea of the Aristotelian philosophy, both as a whole, and in many of its details. But there is still an historic distinction to be noted. For there is an old tradition that Aristotle’s teaching was of a twofold nature and that his writings were of two different kinds, viz. esoteric or acroamatic and exoteric—a distinction which was also made by the Pythagoreans (Vol. I. p 202). The esoteric teaching was given within the Lyceum in the morning, the exoteric in the evening; the latter related to practice in the art of rhetoric and in disputation, as also to civic business, but the other to the inward and more profound philosophy, to the contemplation of nature and to dialectic proper.[86] This circumstance is of no importance; we see by ourselves which of his works are really speculative and philosophic, and which are rather empirical in character; but they are not to be regarded as antagonistic in their content, and as if Aristotle intended some for the people and others for his more intimate disciples.